How to Transition Your Digital Assets When Buying a Property Part II: Social Media and Review and Rating Sites

In part I of How to Transition Your Digital Assets When Buying a Property, we discussed how to ensure your new property website won’t go down, that you’ll have the control over the site’s domain name, and that you’ll have what you need to make updates to your website. In Part II, we will cover how to make sure you can access the property’s multifamily social media, reviews and ratings, and local business directory listings after the sale closes.

Your new apartment community is listed on dozens of online directories and social media sites. During the due diligence process, you’ll want to identify which ones have been manually claimed by the seller’s team. You can use this list of the most popular sites as a starting point:

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

SnapChat

Google My Business

Yelp

Pinterest

Yellow Page

The seller may also have claimed listings through paid services, including:

Apartment Ratings

Moz Local

Internet Listings Services

Some of these accounts are easy to transfer. For example, someone from your team can get added as an administrator to the property’s Facebook page or get the login for the Twitter account. Google My Business, Yelp listings, and other directories where the account was created using an email address associated with the seller’s domain name are a little more complicated. If the email address can’t be updated directly in the account, you’ll need to ask the seller to transfer primary ownership of your Google My Business Listing and to transfer access to your Yelp account. Make sure the seller agrees to help before the sale closes.

There’s almost nothing worse than seeing a 1-star review on Yelp that you can’t respond to, and unless you have the login, the review will remain unanswered. Make sure you identify all of the sites you’ll need to be able to access before the sale closes. Work with the seller to transfer logins and ownership of each site so that you’ll be able manage your new community’s digital assets.